THIS VAST SOUTHERN EMPIRE: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp looks at how American slave states saw England’s 1830s decision to abolish slavery as the beginning of a 19th century Cold War: Britain’s influence could pressure other states into emancipating, eventually leaving the U.S. isolated (though many Southerners were convinced ending slavery was so obviously absurd it would inevitably fail). As the 3/5 clause in the Constitution gave the South disproportionate clout in the federal government, the result was an aggressive foreign policy built around sustaining and allying with slave states such as Brazil, Texas and Cuba (thoughts of England liberating Cuba and creating a nation of black revolutionaries were a major Southern bogeyman) and building up a strong enough military to counteract any overt free-the-slaves moves from Britain. Extremely interesting.
I wrapped up my Leigh Brackett rereading with THE HALFLING AND OTHER STORIES, which strikes me as a very “typical” collection of her works: the titular hardboiled SF yarn about a carnie owner and his mysterious new entertaining, mysterious quests on unknown worlds (Citadel on Lost Ages and Lake of the Gone Forever), and the Eric John Stark story Enchantress of Venus. Less typically there’s the Zenna Hnederson-esque The Truants, the suprisingly upbeat The Shadows and the biting critique of racism, All the Colors of the Rainbow. Overall, excellent (Gone Forever works much better for me now that I’m old enough to have known loss).
And my friend Allegra Gullino has a short story, Jezebel’s Escape in the latest issue of Eldritch Science.
#SFWApro. All rights to cover image remain with current holder.
Riad Sattouf was just a kid when his parents — Syrian dad, French mother — upped and moved from France to Libya. THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984 chronicles Sattouf’s culture shock and experiences dealing with family he’s never met, the policies and economic dysfunction of Khaddafi’s Libya and Assad’s Syria and his parents squabbles and political views. I think I prefer Marjane Satrapi’s 
THE TIME AXIS is a very Olaf Stapledon-ish epic by Henry Kuttner in which a boozing journalist doing an article on a high-powered scientist discovers the real purpose of his assignment is to join a team traveling to the end of time and finding a cure for the mysterious indestructible substance slowly taking over the world’s matter. The story that follows (Arnold Schoenberg’s cover captures a lot of it) seems like Kuttner just kept pumping out ideas and throwing them in — mandroids, transporters, time travel, psi-possession — but it worked for me.
big influence) is a much eerier, darker setting, and Smith is a better writer. That said, this is still entertaining and enjoyably eerie.
After launching Captain America at Marvel, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon moved to DC for a successful run (their Boy Commandos was only a little short of Superman and Batman in sales). THE NEWSBOY LEGION, Volume One collects one of their creations, the story of four homeless, orphaned newsboys (Scrapper, Tommy, Big Words and Gabby) struggling to survive in the grinding poverty of the Suicide Slum neighborhood. Jim Harper, the new cop in the slum, is finding it just as hard to accomplish anything until he adopts the masked identity of the Guardian. As the kids have an uncanny knack for stumbling onto crimes and Nazi plots, it’s just as well Harper has their back in both his identities, though it sure frustrates the kids that they can never quite prove Harper’s the man under the mask.
THE GINGER STAR was Leigh Brackett’s 1970s reboot of her Eric John Stark, showing him as an interstellar rather than an interplanetary adventurer. After Stark’s closest friend disappears on the dying backwater world of Skaith, Stark goes there to hunt for him despite opposition from the cults and gen-engineered races dominating the planet. This makes it something of a Greatest Hits mashup, taking Stark and adding in a dying world 
CHASE by Dan Curtis Johnson and James H. Williams III was a 1998 DC comics series I wish had run longer (though Chase has been bouncing around the DCU ever since). Cameron Chase is an agent for the DEO (yes the inspiration for the one on Supergirl) which covertly watches over the metahuman community. Chase has some issues with the superhero set, but she’s a capable agent who does her job, whether it’s with them or against them; she also has a latent meta-power of her own that allows her to shut down other people’s abilities. The explanation for it was one of the things they never got around to, as well as the mystery about how reformed supervillain Mr. Bones wound up as head of the agency.
THE UNWOMANLY FACE OF WAR: An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexievich is a spectacular collection of anecdotes by women who fought on the Russian front for various reasons (revenge, patriotism, a desire to be near their husbands) and lived through experiences that while certainly familiar (death, friend’s death, near death, scenes of brutality, rape and harassment) comes off fresh, whether because of the female point of view, the grimness of the Russian front or Alexievich having a good eye for a killer quote. The aftermath of the war was a real mixed bag for the interviewees, including those mired in PTSD, those who say they settled down happily, those who were treated as camp followers by their hometowns; a couple who had their husbands carted off by Stalin for getting captured instead of dying. Very good and a fantastic resource if you wants scenes of violence, starvation in sieges or the sounds of combat (like the constant crack of bones when the fighting gets close enough to hear).
Leigh Brackett’s THE NEMESIS FROM TERRA reads like a mash-up of Brackett’s Martian adventures with her hardboiled movie scripts (she worked on both The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye). It’s set in an era when a powerful Earth corporation has taken over Mars, press ganging lower-class Martians and Earthers to work in the mines (reminding me of Diana Wynn Jones’ joke about how miners in fantasy novels are always slaves, never actual miners). Tough-as-nails protagonist Rick is on the run from the press gang when a Martian seer tells him he’s destined to rule. To succeed, though, he’s got to defeat the corporation, it’s ruthless leader and deal with their mutual interest in an attractive revolutionary (the Bacall to Rick’s Bogart). Plus, of course, a lost city.
around this era of film horror ended in 1972 as The Exorcist took the genre in another direction. A good job.
There’s a long tradition of SF authors expanding early short stories or novellas into full novels, which is what Leigh Brackett did with THE SECRET OF SINHARAT (a revised and reworked version of Queen of the Martian Catacombs) and THE PEOPLE OF THE TALISMAN, a reworking of 
